At Lady Molly's - Anthony Powell [92]
Both Alfred Tolland and Mark Members showed relief at the arrival of a third party to break up their téte-à-téte. They had by then reached a conversational standstill. This was the first I had seen of Alfred Tolland since the announcement of my own engagement. I was aware that he could no longer be regarded merely as the embarrassed, conscience-stricken figure, vaguely familiar in the past. Now he fell automatically into place in the profusion of new relationships that follow an organic change of condition. He began at once to mutter incoherent congratulations. Members watched him with something like hatred in his beady eyes.
‘Expect you’ve heard that Erridge has gone East,’ said Alfred Tolland. ‘Just heard it myself. Not—a—bad—idea. They are in a mess there. Perhaps the best thing. Might do him a lot of good. Get experience. Good thing to get experience. Ever been East?’
‘Never.’
‘Got as far as Singapore once,’ he said.
It seemed incredible. However, there appeared to be no reason why he should invent such a thing. I said a word to Members, who stood there looking far from pleased.
‘I shall have to be going now,’ said Alfred Tolland, snatching this offer of release. ‘I expect I shall see you at the dinner next …’
‘I’m not sure yet. Don’t know what our circumstances will be.’
‘Of course, of course. You can’t say. I quite understand. Pity you weren’t at the last one. Nice to feel that we …’
Exact expression of what it was nice for both of us to feel either evaded him, or was too precarious a sentiment to express in words. He merely nodded his head several times. Then he made for the door. Members sighed. He was in a bad humour.
‘What on earth is this party?’ he said in a low voice. ‘Did that man say something about your being engaged?’
‘Yes. I am engaged.’
‘To whom?’
‘Isobel Tolland—over there.’
‘Congratulations,’ said Members, without any exaggerated effusiveness, as if he disapproved of any such step in principle. ‘Many congratulations. I was stuck with that appalling bore for about twenty minutes. It was impossible to get away. Is he absolutely right in the head? What a strange house this is. I met Lady Molly Jeavons quite a long time ago at the Manaschs’. She asked me to come and see her. I called once or twice, but no one answered the bell, though I rang half a dozen times—and knocked too. Then she suddenly telephoned this invitation to me yesterday. She never mendoned your name. I did not think it would be quite like this.’
‘It is often different. You never know what it is going to be.’
‘Have you met her husband?’ said Members, quite plaintively. ‘I talked to him for a while when I first arrived. He asked me if I ever played snooker. Then he introduced me to the man you found me with.’
By then Members had several jobs of a literary kind which, since he was still a bachelor, must bring him in a respectable income. His American trip was said to have been a success. He no longer wrote verse with Freudian undertones, and he had abandoned anything so extreme as Quiggin’s professional ‘communism’, in the wake of which he had for a while half-heartedly trailed. Now he tended to be associated with German literature. Kleist; Grillparzer: Stifter: those were names to be caught on the echoes of his conversadon. Latterly, he was believed to be more taken up with Kierkegaard, then a writer not widely read in this country. Members, no fool, was always a little ahead of the fashion. He was a lively talker when not oppressed, as at that moment, by a party he did not enjoy. His distinguished appearance and terse manner made him a popular spare man at